In the fall of 1973, Clarice Lispector was working on her Sunday crônica (column) for Jornal do Brasil, one of Rio de Janeiro’s leading newspapers. “For as long as I’ve known myself,” she wrote, “social issues have been more important to me than anything else. In Recife the shantytowns were my first truth. Long before I felt ‘art,’ I felt the profound beauty of struggle.” She was describing the northeastern Brazilian city in whose impoverished Jewish community she had grown up during the 1920s and 30s. Although Lispector was one of Brazil’s most acclaimed writers, her article never made the paper. Instead, she was fired by the Jornal shortly after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in a purge of Jewish journalists.
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